Why Global IT Businesses Are Considering a Group-Wide Approach to Product Information

When I speak to IT distributors, resellers and solution providers, one theme comes up again and again: growth makes product information harder to coordinate, standardise and scale across the business.

A company may still operate under one brand, but the reality is more complex. More regions, more teams and more acquisitions usually mean more stakeholders, less clarity over ownership and more complexity in how product information is created, enriched and approved.

The commercial impact is usually felt in slower time to market, duplicated work across the organisation, higher operating cost, and missed opportunities to present products consistently, support attach sales and move quickly across new regions or channels.

As IT businesses grow, product information ownership becomes harder to define

This is one of the most common patterns I see. Different teams all have a legitimate role in shaping product information, but responsibility across the full process becomes less clear as the business grows.

A supplier team may collect source data from vendors. Ecommerce may need channel-ready copy and assets. A technical team may own compatibility fields, service information or accessory relationships. A regional team may need local formats, translations or market-specific attributes. Then an acquired business enters the picture with a different naming structure, different approval steps and a different view of what complete product information looks like.

None of that is unusual. But it does create friction.

One region ends up rebuilding product information another team has already enriched. A newly acquired business keeps publishing from legacy files because its product information is hard to map into the wider group. A launch is delayed because no one is fully sure who owns the final approval step. Accessory relationships, warranties or service attach data get managed differently by different teams, making them harder to reuse at scale.

That is where the challenge becomes much bigger than product information quality alone, because it starts to affect efficiency, consistency and the ability to scale.

“As IT businesses grow across regions, teams and acquisitions, product information often becomes harder to coordinate. The real opportunity is to create one shared framework with a group-wide PIM that brings more clarity, improves collaboration and removes manual complexity from the way the business operates.”

— Martin Balaam, CEO, Pimberly

A global PIM strategy gives IT businesses one framework for product information

For me, this is where the conversation needs to move away from local fixes.

If the challenge has become structural, the answer has to be structural too. That is why I believe IT businesses need to think about PIM at a global level, not just as a tool for one team or one region.

A global PIM rollout creates one shared framework for managing product information across the business. It gives the organisation a single source of truth, but more importantly, it gives teams a common way to contribute, enrich, approve and reuse product information without constantly reinventing the process.

That does not mean flattening every local requirement. Regional teams will still need local attributes. Technical specialists will still need to manage complex data. Acquired businesses will still bring valuable category knowledge. What changes is that those contributions sit inside one structured model instead of being trapped in disconnected systems and workarounds.

That is why, at Pimberly, we recommend approaching PIM as a group-wide framework rather than a tool for fixing isolated issues in one team or region. The goal is to create one shared model for managing product information across the business, so teams can contribute in the right places without working in silos or duplicating effort.

We take that approach because it makes growth easier to manage over time. It simplifies how product information moves across regions, teams and acquired entities, gives the business a clearer operating model, and creates the structure needed to automate more of the manual work that tends to build up as complexity increases.

That matters because it turns product information into something more strategic. Instead of being handled as a series of local operational issues, it becomes part of a wider simplification and automation agenda.

What this approach looks like in practice

This is exactly why, at Pimberly, we recommend treating product information as a group-wide framework rather than something each team, region or acquired business tries to solve in its own way.

In practice, that means creating one shared structure for how product information is collected, enriched, approved and reused across the business. It gives teams a single source of truth to work from, but just as importantly, it makes collaboration easier. Regional teams are not starting from scratch. Acquired businesses have a clearer route into the wider operating model. And the business has a much stronger foundation for simplifying manual work and automating repeatable processes over time.

We have seen that approach make a real difference with large brands across the IT sector.

For Exertis, the benefit was creating a more central, trusted environment for product information so the business could improve how it manages data at scale. That helped support faster time to market, stronger vendor collaboration and much better product information completeness. It is a good example of what happens when product information becomes easier to govern and easier for different parts of the business to work from.

With Westcoast, we showed the value of moving away from a setup that becomes harder to manage as the business grows. By bringing product information into a more centralised and scalable model, Westcoast was able to improve the quality and amount of information it handles, move faster, and do that without increasing headcount at the same rate. It is a practical example of simplification and automation making a real difference.

That is why I think this matters so much. A group-wide approach to product information is not just about creating more order. It is about giving the business a more scalable way to operate as complexity grows.

A single source of truth improves collaboration across the business

“Single source of truth” can sound like a technical phrase, but the real value is much more practical than that.

It means regional teams are not rebuilding the same product information independently. It means ecommerce is not chasing different versions of the same specification set. It means an acquired business has a route into the wider operating model instead of sitting alongside it indefinitely. It means approvals are clearer, updates are more visible, and product information can move more easily across teams and markets.

That is why I see PIM as a collaboration enabler as much as a product information platform. The point is not centralisation for its own sake. The point is making it easier for a growing business to work together without losing consistency.

That creates a much clearer link between better product information management and wider business performance. Collaboration improves, duplication reduces, and the organisation becomes easier to scale.

The business case is simplification and automation

This is the part I would always bring the discussion back to.

The case for a group-wide PIM strategy is not simply that product information becomes better organised. It is that the business becomes easier to run.

A stronger product information model reduces duplicated effort across teams and regions. It makes supplier onboarding more repeatable. It helps standardise approvals. It removes avoidable manual handling. It creates a clearer path for integrating acquisitions. And it gives the business a more scalable way to grow without adding operational complexity at the same rate.

That is why I think the best way to position product information internally is not as a clean-up project, but as a simplification and automation strategy.

It is about improving the way the organisation operates. It is about reducing friction between teams. It is about creating more consistency across the group. And it is about building an operating model that supports growth rather than making growth harder to manage.

Why a group-wide approach to product information matters now

I do not see this as a future issue for IT distributors, resellers and solution providers. For many businesses, it is already here.

If one brand now includes multiple regions, specialist teams and acquired entities, then product information is no longer a local operational concern. It is shared business infrastructure. And once you see it that way, the case for a global PIM strategy becomes much clearer.

The businesses that handle this well are not the ones trying to solve product information one team at a time. They are the ones creating a shared framework that brings clarity to ownership, consistency to execution and structure to collaboration across the whole organisation. That is what makes it easier to integrate acquisitions, support regional teams, reduce duplicated effort and remove the manual complexity that slows growth down.

Done well, a group-wide approach to product information does more than improve data quality. It gives the business a more scalable way to operate, a clearer path to simplification and automation, and a stronger foundation for growth across regions, teams and channels.